SEO Lessons – Lesson 9 – The Link Building Paradox

Today I want to talk about something I like to call the link building paradox.

When it comes to getting your site to rank better in the search engines, the most important thing you can do is get more quality links to your site. Now there are a lot of ways to get links to your website, but the major search engines like Google will tell you to do this by providing quality content on your pages and people will naturally link to you over time.

The only problem is that if your site is new and you have no links, it doesn’t matter how much great content you have if you don’t have any links nobody’s going to see it.

It’s like building a shopping mall in the middle of Siberia.

Which brings me to the paradox. If you have a site that ranks well in the search engines, other people are naturally going to link to you if your site has good content to offer. By having a high ranking website, it’s easy to get more links to your website since when people are doing searches in the Internet, your website will show up. Next time they’re writing about a topic the site covers in their blog or in a forum, the high ranking site they found by searching in Google is going to get that coveted link, and that high ranking site gets even more links – it’s the rich getting richer. Conversely, if you have a site that doesn’t have any links, your ranking in the search engines is going to be low, if not non existent. Nobody is going to link to your site naturally over time if they don’t even know it exists, the poor get poorer. Hence what I call the link building paradox.

This is why I don’t like such conservative views on how to build links to a website – the just provide great content and the links will come method. This view may be in the best interest of the search engines, but it’s definitely not in your best interest especially if you have a new website that you’d like to get the search engines to notice and rank well.

This is where hiring a link building company or doing the link building yourself comes in. Think of it just as you would any other promotion for your website. You don’t usually expect a TV reporter to just randomly call you up and ask if they can promote your business – no, you buy ads on their network. You also don’t expect to see anybody writing about your business in the newspaper if you haven’t done any type of promotion.

The same goes for link building, if you’re not willing to promote your website then why should anyone else care and link to you?

For the do it yourselfers, here’s a couple strategies you don’t want to be without when promoting your website.

The first is the press release. You can do this yourself or hire a pro. If you have a brand new site, then be sure to write one and let the whole world know that your website is open for business. Even if you think you have a boring and normal website, an experienced press release writer will be able to come up with a press release that will get you more links, traffic, and sales. Anytime you do something new or launch a new product or service, be sure to send out another press release. This is a surefire way to work your way up in the rankings.

The second is to be sure to write articles. You can use articles to get the word out about your website and post them on hundreds of sites that will give you a link back to your website just for allowing them to use the article. You could even take an article and turn it into a video just like this and get even more bang for your buck.